This weekend my friend Martha visited me for the first time since I moved. We did a lot of fun touristy things like the Freedom Trail and the aquarium, but we also spent a fair amount of time baking because that’s just how we roll. Martha brought a book of macaron recipes for us to try out. She, Rae and I tasted French macarons for the first time this past spring when we were in Paris, and they were amazing (they were from Ladurée, so we went straight to the source!). I’ve been borderline obsessed with them for a long time and since we’re both experienced bakers, we thought we would try our hand at making our own. You can probably tell by the post title that it didn’t go exactly as expected.
You can find plenty of macaron recipes on the internet, but the one we used called for some pretty complicated ingredients that were unlike anything else I’d baked before. Stuff like ground almonds and caster sugar, which I had to google before we went to the grocery store. We managed to find a box of caster sugar and ground up our own almonds in the food processor. We decided to go with a chocolate cookie in order with a chocolate ganache filling to keep things simple, but the dark chocolate cocoa powder in the cookie seemed to suck all the moisture out of the batter. Our batter ended up so thick it could barely be piped!
Martha says the piping bag looks like the lung in a smoking PSA.
The end result. Not quite like the photos on the cover.
So instead of lovely, delicate pastries we ended up with ugly chocolate lumps. All was not lost, though, because they actually tasted quite good. They didn’t really taste like the macarons, but sort of like a chewy brownie. In fact, we took to calling them maca-brownies to make ourselves feel better. On the plus side, the ganache came out perfectly, so our baking egos aren’t bruised too badly.
Now I’ve got macarons on the brain, so I’ll have to check out some of the macaron purveyors of Boston!
For Science! 